PDC’s FranklinCovey® workshop helps Josh Pannell prioritize his work life

12/6/2013

As a financial analyst for CIE’s Professional Development Center (UT PDC), Josh Pannell has a busy schedule of reports, emails and meetings—all demanding, urgent and requiring immediate attention. He found himself feeling overwhelmed and in dire need of finding new ways to prioritize his duties. He’s not alone. Josh’s predicament has become a very common story in virtually every industry around the world.

In our struggling economy, more and more companies have reduced staff while increasing the responsibilities of the team members they retain. Stress levels are high, and new workflow tools are becoming necessary in order to maintain, if not increase, productivity with smaller staffing.

To help employees feel less burdened and be happier and more productive, UT PDC offers FranklinCovey®--The 5Choices™ to Extraordinary Productivity. This one-day workshop is designed to help participants make the right choices when planning their work schedules so that they “act on the important” and “go for the extraordinary.”

We spoke with Josh to ask him how FranklinCovey has helped him bring more balance to his work life.

Why did you enroll in the FranklinCovey course? Was there a moment or incident that prompted you to pursue this course?

Josh Pannell: “I can't pinpoint a specific day in time, but I do remember a particular feeling that drove me to sign up for the class. It was a feeling of being overwhelmed. Everything that came across my desk, no matter who it was from, seemed to come with the same sense of urgency. The workload became almost too much to handle. I knew I needed to find a way to help me prioritize and organize.”

Since taking the class, have you used anything that you learned in the course in your current position? What was the single best take-away for you?

“The best piece of advice I took from the course is that you set the expectations of yourself for others. If you treat every task, email, incident as if it’s an emergency, then you set the expectation that you are always available and will instantly react. Doing so takes you away from your task at hand and undermines the quality of work you are truly capable of producing. Putting this philosophy into practice, I have since changed the way I respond to emails. I no longer receive a notice or a bell or a banner with every single email that arrives. Instead I check my email at regular intervals during the day instead of constantly reacting to new messages. This reduces the number of distractions I face while working on specific tasks and allows me to complete those tasks more timely. I’m also able to provide a much better end product as a result.”

What bit of advice would you want to pass on to someone considering taking the FranklinCovey course?

“If you feel like your day is constantly filled with competing priorities, or if it seems like everything that comes to you is classified as urgent and important, then this class is for you. It helps you learn to put things into the proper perspective as well as offers some helpful tools you can put into practice instantly to make life a bit easier.”